John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘What do you think of the story?’

‘I think it’s pretty silly. Let’s go home,’ she said though it was an hour from the closing hour, raising the umbrella as soon as we reached the street. It was raining as usual.

‘Why did you tell that silly story about the umbrellas?’ she asked on the bus.

‘Why did you tell the story of the farmer?’

‘They were different,’ she said.

‘Yes. They were different,’ I agreed. For some reason she resented the story.

In the rain we made love again, she the more fierce, and after the seed spilled she said, ‘Wait,’ and moving on a dying penis, under the unsteady umbrella in her hands, she trembled towards an inarticulate cry of pleasure, and as we walked into the street lamp I asked, we had so fallen into the habit of each other, ‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings. To go with her on the train to Thurles on a Friday evening in summer and walk the three miles to her house from the station. To be woken the next morning by the sheepdog barking the postman to the door and have tea and brown bread and butter in a kitchen with the cool of brown flagstones and full of the smell of recent baking.

Or: fear of a housing estate in Clontarf, escape to the Yacht Sunday mornings to read the papers in peace over pints, come home dazed in the midday light of the sea front to the Sunday roast with a peace offering of sweets. Afterwards in the drowse of food and drink to be woken by, ‘You promised to take us out for the day, Daddy,’ until you backed the hire-purchased Volkswagen out the gateway and drove to Howth and stared out at the sea through the gathering condensation on the semicircles the wipers made on the windshield, and quelled quarrels and cries of the bored children in the back seat.

I decided not to tell her either of these pictures as they might seem foolish to her.

‘We’d have to save if we were to think about it,’ I heard her voice.

‘We don’t save very much, do we?’

‘At the rate the money goes in the pubs we might as well throw our hat at it. Why did you ask?’

‘Because’, it was not easy to answer then, when I had to think, ‘I like being with you.’

‘Why, why,’ she asked, ‘did you tell that stupid story about the umbrellas?’

‘It happened, didn’t it? And we never make love without an umbrella. It reminded me of you.’

‘Such rubbish,’ she said angrily. ‘The sea and sand and a hot beach at night, needing only a single sheet, that’d make some sense, but an umbrella?’

It was the approach of summer and it was the false confidence it brings that undid me. It rained less. One bright moonlit night I asked her to hold the umbrella.

‘For what?’

She was so fierce that I pretended it’d been a joke.

‘I don’t see much of a joke standing like a fool holding an umbrella to the blessed moonlight,’ she said.

We made love awkwardly, the umbrella lying in the dry leaves, but I was angry that she wouldn’t fall in with my wish, and another night when she asked, ‘Where are you going on your holidays?’ I lied that I didn’t know. ‘I’ll go home if I haven’t enough money. And you?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. I saw she resented that I’d made no effort to include her in the holiday. Sun and sand and sea, I thought maliciously, and decided to break free from her. Summer was coming and the world full of possibilities. I did not lead her under the trees behind the church, but left after kissing her lightly, ‘Goodnight.’ Instead of arranging to meet as usual at the radiators, I said, ‘I’ll ring you during the week.’ Her look of anger and hatred elated me. ‘Ring if you want,’ she said as she angrily closed the door.

I was so clownishly elated that I threw the umbrella high in the air and laughing loudly caught it coming down, and there was the exhilaration of staying free those first days; but it soon palled. In the empty room trying to read, while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear, I began to realize I’d fallen more into the habit of her than I’d known. Not wanting to have to see the umbrella I put it behind the wardrobe, but it seemed to be more present than ever there; and often the longing for her lips, her body, grew, close to sickness, and eventually dragged me to the telephone.

‘I didn’t expect to hear from you after this time,’ she said.

‘I was ill.’

She was ominously silent as if she knew it for the lie that it was.

‘I wondered if we could meet?’

‘If you want,’ she answered. ‘When?’

‘What about tonight?’

‘I cannot but tomorrow night is all right.’

‘At eight, then, at the radiators?’

‘Say, at Wynn’s Hotel instead.’

The imagination, quickened by distance and uncertainty, found it hard to wait till the eight of the next day, but when the bus drew in, and she was already waiting, the mind slipped back into its old complacency.

‘Where’d you like to go?’

‘Some place quiet. Where we can talk,’ she said.

Crossing the bridge, past where the band had played the first day we met, the Liffey was still in the summer evening.

‘I missed you a great deal.’ I tried to draw close, her hands were white gloved.

‘What was your sickness?’

‘Some kind of flu.’

She was hard and separate as we walked. It was one of the new lounge bars she picked. It had piped music and red cushions. The bar was empty, the barman polishing glasses. He brought the Guinness and sweet sherry to the table.

‘What did you want to say?’ I asked when the barman had returned to polishing the glasses.

‘That I’ve thought about it and that our going out is a waste of time. It’s a waste of your time and mine.’

It was as if a bandage had been torn from an open wound.

‘But why?’

‘It will come to nothing.’

‘You’ve got someone else, then?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘But why, then?’

‘I don’t love you.’

‘But we’ve had many happy evenings together.’

‘Yes, but it’s not enough.’

‘I thought that after a time we would get married.’ I would grovel on the earth or anything to keep her then. Little by little my life had fallen into her keeping, it was only in the loss I had come to know it, life without her, the pain of the loss of my own life without the oblivion the dead have, all longing changed to die out of my own life on her lips, in her thighs, since it was only through her it lived.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said, and, sure of her power, ‘All those wasted evenings under that old umbrella. And that moonlit night you tried to get me to hold it up like some eejit. What did you take me for?’

‘I meant no harm and couldn’t we try to make a new start?’

‘No. There should be something magical about getting married. We know too much about each other. There’s nothing more to discover.’

‘You mean … our bodies?’

‘Yes.’

She moved to go and I was desperate.

‘Will you have one more drink?’

‘No, I don’t really want.’

‘Can we not meet just once more?’

‘No.’ She rose to go. ‘It’d only uselessly prolong it and come to the same thing in the end.’

‘Are you so sure? If there was just one more chance?’

‘No. And there’s no need for you to see me to the bus. You can finish your drink.’

‘I don’t want to,’ and followed her through the swing-door.

At the stop in front of the Bank of Ireland I tried one last time. ‘Can I not see you home this last night?’